JEREMY Hunt deserves credit for taking some decisions that will only pay off after the next General Election, according to opinion polling expert Sir John Curtice.

He told GB News: “It’s a budget which was clearly trying to promote growth, because we do have this problem of very high levels of taxation, record levels of taxation.

“We’re heading for record levels of spending but public services are struggling to deliver, not least in the health service.

“In a sense, you might want to say that Jeremy Hunt should be applauded for perhaps engaging in some relatively detailed not headline grabbing changes that in some respects won’t deliver a dividend, if they do deliver a dividend, for two or three years down the track.

“Perhaps it is rather good that we’ve got a politician who’s willing to think long term to a degree, even though the amount of time between now and the next General Election is beginning to get short.”

In a discussion with Andrew Pierce and Bev Turner, he said: “We are heading for record levels of taxation, record levels of spending against a backdrop where the economy is a little bit better now than it was last autumn, but where on average we are going to suffer a 6% fall in living standards during the course of the next two years.

“And to that extent, at least it’s a confirmation of the economic difficulties that we already knew that we were in and out of which we cannot get with any degree of obvious rapidity or of ease.

“The tax increases, of course, are essentially ones that are already announced and they primarily consist of the fact that the levels at which you start paying income tax, and start paying a high level of income tax, have been frozen.”

Sir John continued: “The truth is, yes, our living standards are falling but what governments try and do to get out of it is by trying to promote growth, not by trying to lower taxation, but providing incentives for business investment, and also to get more of us to go to work.

“It doesn’t fit the ideology very comfortably of either the Conservative or the Labour Party but the truth is the country faces hard, difficult questions to which simply relying on ideology is not necessarily the answer.”

On the pensions change, he said: “On the one hand Labour would say this is something that benefits the rich, the Government is going to try to argue this is a crucial way of trying to ensure that we keep doctors in a health service that is starting to deliver.

“Perhaps the only major headline is the expansion of childcare provision because if we look at that with a long lens, it represents a confirmation of a major change in the role of the state.

“That is the state now thinks it has a significant responsibility to help to pay for the cost of childcare so that parents can go to work.

That’s really a development. It’s only happened during the course of the last decade or so.”